Converting desire on YouTube, part 1

Why I think Michaela Nikolaenko’s “Raised & Redeemed” podcast is important

“I don’t filter what my guests say.”

There’s something about how the internet works on our attention. I think that it’s yielding a culture in the American Orthodox Church that is disproportionately masculine, which is problematic to the growth of our communities both spiritual and bodily. The imbalance, I hypothesize, is due to the divergent ways the internet affects our gendered psychology. Relative to each other, men are predominantly thymic, which means they are driven to control things, stressing the common human faculty to repulse what is bad and wrong — whereas women are predominantly epithymetic; that is, they stress rather the common human faculty of desire, of appetite, of attracting what is deemed good and pleasurable. Media works on both aspects of our souls equally, the repulsive and the attractive, both in men and women, forming our behavior in order to corral attention and profit from it. Our lower passions of indignation and desire are weaknesses by which our rational minds can be circumvented. Taking advantage of that, advertisers and politicos and all those who themselves are driven by the desire for our money or the need to control us can thereby program us as they will. Sure, these new cybernetic Roman roads of the soul are powerful means of building an evil empire in rebellion against God and nature, but as with the old Roman roads, they can also be used to preach the Gospel. However, there’s something about the attractive power of desire, as opposed to the negating power of indignation, that when manipulated, leaves us less open to rational insight and less free to change.

Those in the West who do manage to convert to Orthodoxy, meanwhile, are destined to play an outsized role in the determination of the Church community’s character, the Church being so small outside of places like Greece, Russia, and the Balkans. That the roads we are given to work with supply us with converts predominantly thymic in character complicates the patterns of the spiritual life native to the Church. The proper use of desire, rather, is prioritized in Orthodoxy’s metanoia (repentance). It was Eve who initiated our descent from grace with her wayward desire, and therefore it was the Mother of God who through the purity of her desire reversed that descent and gave birth to Emmanuel — initiating His ministry, moreover, by her request for wine at the Wedding at Cana. A woman’s desire is pivotal to the fall not because women are evil but because women are pivotal. Likewise our desire is pivotal; our feminine desire for God, speaking on behalf of both women and men, needs to be the basis of our relationship with Him. Thus it was the Myrrh-bearing Women in their soulful mourning who first discovered the Resurrection and announced it to the male disciples, and, psychologically speaking, the ascetic fathers of the Church teach us it is in the correction of gluttony, the most basic desire, that our soul first turns around and begins actively participating in our justification.

On the internet, however, to meet people where they are, appeals must be made to impassioned souls. From the Church’s perspective, it’s apparently easier when using electronic media to rustle up masculine souls eager to gain control of their lives in the midst of the chaos of the world, à la Jordan Peterson, than feminine souls whose desire is fueled on “good vibes” and the religion of consumerism à la, I don’t know... the entirety of Instagram and TikTok. Those who seek definition and discipline have a path towards stable structures of unity, the likes of which indeed are fostered by the Church, even if that’s not how it prioritizes its approach to the spiritual life. But as I wrote previously in my “Converting desire” article, worldly desires dissipate the soul; they fragment and multiply, leading not to unity but to plurality. It’s like the difference between training dogs and herding cats: there’s a business model to be had around the former but not the latter. Consequently, the more canine, er, masculine the Church community becomes, the less appealing it will be to epithymetic feline souls fixed on serving their appetites for independence in an increasingly automated technological world. Infertility becomes a problem as the culture itself becomes psychologically sterile — dogs and cats don’t mate. The problems of the world become those of the Church because, for one thing, where else are our people going to come from? But also, it’s explicitly the mission of the Church to apply itself to the problems of the world. So how do we convert desire?

I’ve addressed this topic as an inward, spiritual problem in previous articles. That’s the most essential angle. Here I want to look at it as a social problem, though — as a matter of community outreach in the internet age. It’s easy to name masculine Orthodox Christian voices online making masculine appeals that attract masculine converts. The Orthodox men are really punching above their weight in terms of online visibility. Where are the counterpart feminine influencers, I wonder? I know I’m not the best person to answer this question. I understand different platforms appeal to different genders, with feminine minds skewing heavily towards places like Instagram and TikTok. I’m not on these platforms, never have been, and I’m not likely to start figuring them out now. Freshly corrupting myself with them even for this purpose would hardly be worthwhile! YouTube, however, is a platform I’m already corrupted by, and while it skews masculine, it does so a lot less than other platforms like X and Discord. I have indeed discovered a few feminine Orthodox voices on YouTube that I have not seen discussed elsewhere, and I’d like to tell people about them. To begin, I’m going to focus the rest of this article on a woman who besides her presence on Instagram and TikTok also has a YouTube channel: Michaela Nikolaenko.

An Indiana-native Florida resident in her twenties, Michaela Nikolaenko hosts a podcast called Raised & Redeemed. This is its YouTube home page, and this is a playlist of the podcast episodes (my preferred way of using her channel). She is only recently Orthodox, having been received in the Church just this year. The bulk of her Raised & Redeemed episodes dating back a couple years — primarily interviews with guests, with just a few solo shows sprinkled here and there — come from an Evangelical Protestant perspective. So why highlight her podcast in the context of Orthodoxy? Because I think her content displays the type of epithymetic, desire-based Evangelical Christianity that is compatible to conversion to the Orthodox Church. Her own journey is a testament to that.

Most of her videos feature the testimony of a guest whom she found through social media and whose story she can relate to. But you’ll learn from her own testimony video (embedded below) what a terrible childhood she had, what a disastrous adolescence, and what a vicious early adulthood. She’s a child of her age, and her sinful ways of life were typical for her generation. Yes, her lifestyle brand before conversion to Jesus was yoga (how did you guess?). Born to parents who had Christian backgrounds but who were captive to strip club culture and hard drug habits, she had a mother who was incarcerated and a father who was abusive, and in her teens, also incarcerated. Early childhood trauma sparks a lifetime’s worth of addiction to pleasure, especially in women who are already epithymetically disposed by gender. Yoga, New Age, and feminist ideology informed her slightly more mature attempt to overcome her painful background, but they just fed back into her self-love and destructive habits. Living a life of pleasure patterned after her parents, she found it fulfilled and made whole only in the love of Christ, in the devotion to Him who sacrificed Himself for her.

(This version of her testimony is now two years old. In the following interview on the Almost False podcast from this past February, we hear more vivid details of her story and conversion, even if the thumbnail image isn’t exactly on brand.)

While, yes, Michaela Nikolaenko has eventually converted to the Orthodox Church, there was no other route for her to that destination except through Non-denominational Evangelical Protestantism. Evangelical culture in America is a thing unto itself, attracting certain personality types and repelling others. The repulsion (in case you’re of the personality type that needs this to be addressed) is layered according to the fractal polarity of thymos and epithymia. Reformed Christians of the Calvinist bent base their faith in a thymically styled doctrinal conviction that subordinates — if not, in the extreme cases, eliminates — feelings. For them, desires are things to be suppressed and disciplined; femininity exists to be controlled. Evangelicalism spreads within Protestant America as an epithymetic reaction to that thymic imbalance. Its faith is fueled by revivals, in need of constant injections of enthusiasm, the pleasure of faith being dialectically reliant on the pain of sin (hence reciting personal tales about being rescued from sin becomes a ritualistic, almost sacramental practice).

The variability of enthusiasm naturally alienates Calvinists fixated on stability and control. But Evangelicals share with Reformed Christians a sense of fierce individualism after their common Protestant mold, alienating those of the Catholic faith. You see, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation already put down a layer of thymic–epithymetic polarity before Evangelicalism arrives. While more complex in its origins, Roman Catholic psychology, on the ground level, as it develops alongside the thymic Protestant rebellion, stresses the epithymetic contours of its faith — and of its propensity for sin. The more communal, sacramental aspects of both its piety and its profanity are right there in the “Catholic” branding, yielding a more contemplative attraction to beauty, and an accordingly different relationship with guilt, traits that put it at odds with the materialistic aesthetics of American Non-denominationalism, despite their common emphasis on desire. Desires work contrarily if they are for communal pleasure or for individual pleasure.

I lay out this makeshift dialectical gridwork to place Nikolaenko’s Non-denominational background in context, so that anyone prone to bias against it for thymic or epithymetic reasons can appreciate it more rationally, avoiding the fatal error of casting out some relative good in their rejection of the relative bad. Her podcast, after all, is called Raised & Redeemed. The relative good within American Born Again Protestantism — this propensity for desire within an individualist mindset so fundamental to the American character — needs to be redeemed. That’s the whole mission, remember? Converting desire. Michaela Nikolaenko is doing that.

So, Calvinists and Catholics aside, there’s one other particular group of people who might be put off by the Evangelical character of this podcast, and that’s precisely the people this podcast is for: desire-fueled, individualist Americans like Michaela’s past self, whose personalities definitely fit the Evangelical mold, but who are fighting Jesus due to attachment to pleasure (both in sex and drugs), the diabolical empowerment of New Age magic and divination, and all the ideologies rationalizing such lifestyles. When such souls are ready, I think Michaela’s approach is the type they’ll eventually resort to, feeling the call in their hearts despite the layers of sinful revulsion.

Michaela serves these souls by presenting an attractive image of an attractive young woman appealingly relieved from the stress and guilt and trauma of sin and demonic activity properly so identified, now happily wedded to a responsible man dedicated to serving her in the image of Christ as they joyfully begin their family, blessed just this year with a beautiful newborn baby girl. But again, though the podcast’s content is determined by her personality, it isn’t primarily focused on her. Mostly she opens the space for guests to give testimonies that she relates to.

Relatability is the operative word here. It’s a key component of making appeals to more feminine, epithymetic personalities. In pop culture it has often come to be emphasized to a fault in creative content due to the incentivization patterns of social media. When art is deemed good or bad based not on principles of beauty, goodness, and truth, but on whether you relate to it or you don’t relate to it, then no one is ever challenged, minds and hearts are never expanded, and that which can be related to shrinks to an increasingly limited, polarized subset of perspectives determined by the dialectic of relatable and not relatable — or “normal” and “weird” according to our current political memes. All of that is a problem, but it’s a problem of imbalance. Relatability, especially as it relates to femininity, remains a fundamental positive aspect of human compassion and needs to be nurtured in the proper context.

On Raised & Redeemed, relatability comes at the expense of any critical pushback. Michaela’s posture as a host towards her guests is solely supportive and nurturing. As you get to know her, you can recognize at times when a guest says something that seems off to her or maybe even wrong, but her instinct is never to contradict them. She’s here to affirm and nurture, and she selects her guests so as to do that as much as possible. This openness and lack of pushback is essential to the feminine quality of her content in its epithymetic dimensions. Of course life is incomplete if it’s all maternal nurturing with no paternal limitations. The relative imbalance has to be accounted for somehow, and so she adds a disclaimer to many of her videos in which she says,

Quick disclaimer: What we can agree on here is that we love Jesus, and He is our Lord and Savior. I don’t filter what my guests say, so there will most likely be something along the way that you don’t agree with, and that’s okay. I highly recommend spending time researching and praying about anything that gets said that might trouble you.

The emphasis is on desire for Jesus and not critical attention to correct teaching. Tares may get sown among the wheat, bad things may get caught up in the dragnet, but that is what Jesus tells us the kingdom of heaven is like, until the final judgment in any case. But that judgment comes second. Michaela is attending to what comes first.

I would argue that this epithymetic approach has more priority to the Orthodox Christian way of life than the thymic repulsion of doctrinal falsehood more commonly found in the more attention-getting corners of Orthodox YouTube. The term apologetics comes historically from the Church’s defense of its beliefs and practices from the hostile world around it (apologia means defense), but in common parlance has come to refer more generally to how the Church holds intercourse with the world outside itself. Positive apologetics, the recognition and appreciation of relative good in others, must precede negative apologetics, the critical differentiation of the Church’s faith from the relative bad in others. Really, this should be intuitive, just as with the people we meet in the course of our lives, whether they be neighbors or people we meet through work or recreation, the priority is to relate with them as much as possible, at the very least as fellow human beings.

As St. Sophrony of Essex writes about his holy elder, “Father Silouan’s attitude towards those who differed from him was characterised by a sincere desire to see what was good in them, and not to offend them in anything they held sacred” (Saint Silouan the Athonite, p. 63). I first read that as a young man, and it made such a deep and lasting impression on me. This resistance to causing offense in things people hold sacred has nothing to do with political correctness or being wishy-washy about the truth. To the contrary, this approach to others with humility and love safeguards the affirmation of truth. Because the truth simply can’t be affirmed in any other context. Before you can be Orthodox, you have to be Christian; and before you can be Christian, you have to be human. There’s an order to things.

Anyhow, since Raised & Redeemed is mostly a show about Nikolaenko soliciting the testimonies of others, I want to highlight an example of such an episode. I find the story of Jessica Wiltshire’s fallen and resurrected marriage (in Ep. 76) to be highly inspiring and instructive. Maybe I choose this one because I can relate to it more than the testimonies about sex work and New Age; this one’s just about human relationships and the tragedy of desire. It begins with the type of mutual feminine nurturing that guys not so epithymetically inclined can struggle to endure, but indeed, if such a guy were to stick through it, he could learn something essential about how a marriage can fall apart under the surface and without his awareness due to feminine longing.

This conversation between two mutually supportive women is also fascinating for how critical they mutually are of women who support each other according not to wise counsel but to selfish desires. Wiltshire’s girlfriends used their feminine nurturing to encourage her affair, which act of apparent friendship Wiltshire and Nikolaenko now condemn. This rejection exemplifies a proper use of thymos in personalities primarily motivated by epithymia, as does the role that “conviction” plays in Evangelical culture, also evident here. I’ve often used the word conviction in an active sense to describe the thymic repulsion of falsehood on the contemplative level, but other Christians, especially Protestants, commonly use it in a passive sense translating how the verb ἐλέγχω is used in the New Testament. To be convicted is to be proved sinful. It is to be convinced that you are wrong. Epithymia and thymos are contained within each other. Desire for a thing will unavoidably entail a repulsion from that which is not that thing. A desire may begin abstractly and without precision, but if it is to persist, it must be further and further defined with conviction; else there would no longer be a desire. A propulsion is necessary, and that propulsion must go from general to specific. A woman may generally desire to be married to a man, say, but if she fails to identify a specific man that she desires, in contradistinction to the others, she will ultimately fail to attain (or maintain) the desired marriage.

And we see in Nikolaenko’s journey that it’s the same thing with desiring Jesus. At first she desired Him in a general sense that tolerated sexual immorality and included New Age beliefs and practices — the demonic activity of which, she discovered through conviction, could not be maintained in conjunction with worshiping Jesus. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus tells us (John 14:15). As a Non-denominational Christian, then, convicted of the sin of her past, she hosted a podcast focused on the love of Jesus that did not filter what her guests said. Inevitably contradictions arose requiring her desire be further honed in its focus. Some professed, to name one example, that Christians couldn’t be possessed by demons; this is a claim refuted by many, including many Protestants (and including Orthodox). Asking questions of pastors concerning controversies like this one, she found conflicting answers. All the inconsistencies of Protestant teachings and practices, including some clearly corrupt, as she observed for instance in deliverance ministries, became a burden on her at the same time that the Evangelical rituals of performed enthusiasm were failing to fulfill her. Her desire for Jesus required a deeper relationship, made stronger through conviction in the truth. Providentially, her husband’s cultural heritage presented a new and different option (for her and her husband, who hadn’t been devoutly Orthodox), one she hadn’t known of before.

This is how she describes it in the videos documenting her conversion to Orthodoxy, anyhow (embedded below).

A couple times in past episodes, guests of Raised & Redeemed have been invited on more for the knowledge they had to impart than the testimony they had to give, such as an undercover police detective speaking about sex trafficking or an advocate for victims of child abuse sharing counsel and resources for healing. Now, as Michaela has converted to Orthodoxy and faced many objections to it, she has twice had on the show her catechist and fellow parishioner Jamey Bennett (co-host of Ancient Faith’s Bad Books of the Bible podcast) to answer apologetical questions. It is a new direction for the podcast to take, but an organic development of the host’s desire-based, conviction-honed relationship with her Lord. It remains an adventure to see where things will go next. When she renounced her New Age involvement, she had to rebrand her podcast from Mindful Michaela to Raised & Redeemed. With her latest shift, a rebranding does not appear necessary. I hope the podcast continues everything that has made it successful so far, even as it finds itself in a new phase of life, bearing fruit in the Lord according to a godly union.

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I’m optimistically referring to this article as “part 1” in hopes that I can continue the series highlighting other voices. I have at least one in mind I’d like to do next — with God’s blessing. That last part is essential as I’ve continued to struggle this summer to be productive intellectually, creatively, physically, and spiritually. Writing has been inordinately difficult. I’ve maintained at least a two-post-per-month pace, which could be worse, but I expect better of myself. I humbly and pitifully ask the prayers of anyone so dedicated to have read down this far.

Part 2 now available here!